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Topic: Would you contribute money to a POSTAL remake? (Read 13597 times)

Recently a website called Kickstarter has been used to fund a few videogame remakes and sequels, most notably the remake of Leisure Suit Larry in Land of the Lounge Lizards and the sequel to the 1988 title Wasteland, Wasteland 2.

Now, with these Kickstarters being extremely successful in raising the funds needed to develop the videogames an idea has come to mind...why not start a Kickstarter to fund a remake of the original POSTAL?

Use this thread for discussion regarding whether or not you think a POSTAL remake Kickstarter would be successful, would you contribute money to a Kickstarter and so forth.

I think that Kickstarter would probably be the best option at the moment, considering that RWS basically has no capital and the fact that every publisher they ever meet tries to screw them. Definitely time to go the Indie route I think.

The only thing I can add is that this game must have Linux support - not that RWS has ever had a problem with that when it had any control. Based on Double Fine and Wasteland 2, it would be financially unwise to proceed with this without a solid cross-platform base (Linux, Mac, and Windows).

Also, if this would go the Indie route, I might actually suggest eschewing the larger corporate engines and going with something a little bit cheaper. You could even use one of the free software engines such as Darkplaces, which will give you decent enough graphics (especially for an independent title) with no licensing costs attached. See the graphics on Xonotic, for instance.

Just my 2 cents - which is considerably less than the real amount I would give you on Kickstarter, I promise you.

Linux support would be nice, but it's kinda unlikely, the main engines we would probably go with (UDK, or Unity) don't export to Linux (I might be wrong about Unity there). I'd really want it on unreal, to to help with encouraging mod support after release.

Mod support is nice, but Unreal is not the only engine that can be modded. And if you do decide to go the Kickstarter route, not putting up Linux would be unwise. We may not be the largest in numbers, but in things like this we can contribute a sizable chunk of revenue.

Wasteland 2, Double Fine, and the Humble Bundles more than demonstrate this.

I would not support the project, even if I do like RWS, if it does not have Linux support. And I think that would be true of several other people who would want to support you as well.

And as I said, I personally think that licensing an engine for this would be an unneeded expense. Darkplaces is there free of charge, has a long chain of development tools with a strong Quake tradition, and has several hobbyist and independent games on it already. That sounds pretty mod friendly to me.

Please consider these points. I am not trying to be annoying, but I do really want this to be something I can support.

Nah feedback is always welcome, but the short of it is that should this go ahead it will save time and money to go with an Engine that we are already familiar with, as the core team that would work on this are all from an Unreal backgroud. Still, as UDK now supports Mac we can only hope they go that way for Linux too, I'd love to see any future projects on Linux. It's unlikely we would change something as fundamental as the engine choice to make sure it supported Linux, but Android could be another story due to the potential commercial gains from doing so, and UDK does not currently support that either (although rumored to be doing so in the future).

We also have to think about things like aftersales support. As it stands non of us use Linux, so it would take a reasonable amount of man hours to port, then support a Linux version. Not saying it would not be wroth it, just pointing out that covering Linux and all it's distros is quite an undertaking. We had to recently update Postal 2 to support newer versions of Linux, we were lucky Ryan was willing to do the update, and in the future we might not be so lucky.

The short of it is, the sort of extra kickstarter money that we would get from promising a Linux port is probably far less than would be needed to cover the costs of actually porting it right away, unless Epic do the right thing and make UDK export to Linux.

This is all just speculation right now anyhow, so you're always welcome to throw out your thoughts and ideas. I'm actually a big fan of Linux, I just never run it because working in game design a good 80% of the programs I need either only work on Windows, or work better on Windows than via Wine.

I'd most likely be part of the team,and unreal is all I know..I think it could very easily be made as an add on to postal 2 tho..(AW style) UE2 is in same ballpark as unity.. being asymmetric it wouldn't take full advantage of the UE3 engine anyway.. movies,and cutscenes,etc may suffer,but you know.. It's my understanding that nvidia is trying to port all the ue2 games it can to android,and ue2 is already linux ready..something to consider.

in any case it comes down to a few basic questions..does it have to be latest,and greatest? if so. Can you live without linux support..I like to play with linux from time to time,but epic screwed linux with ut3/UDK plain,and simple..also modding UDK games?..(could be wrong) but I haven't seen a UDK based game yet that was "easy" to mod .. keeping in mind. I've only cooked one final game.. as a test..so could very well be wrong on this..